Israeli shop offers a low- rent solution

January 10, 2007
by Hamilton Nolan

If you're from New York (or San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Tokyo, and on and on...), your forehead probably bears a hand-shaped indentation gained from slapping yourself in the head so many times as you gasped: "$2,500 a month for a rat-infested studio apartment directly over an active meth lab! Well, there is a Whole Foods on the corner."

If you're from New York (or San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Tokyo, and on and on...), your forehead probably bears a hand-shaped indentation gained from slapping yourself in the head so many times as you gasped: "$2,500 a month for a rat-infested studio apartment directly over an active meth lab! Well, there is a Whole Foods on the corner."

Luckily for the proverbial little man, a proverbial knight in shining armor has now stood up to take on the proverbial boogeyman that is the out-of-control real-estate industry. And these proverbial Don Quixotes are what the yuppies fear most: art-school dropouts bearing cardboard prostitutes.

Take your theoretical engineering mumbo jumbo and shove it, city planners! All we need to create vast swaths of affordable housing are hookers, hookers, and more hookers. Want to gentrify my nice middle-class neighborhood, yuppie scum? How do you like this full-color, rearview booty-short-wearing cardboard hooker pasted on your building? What will your law-firm pals think about that?

We salute this grassroots effort to draw attention to the threat of gentrification, the plight of hookers, and the creative use of cardboard. But honestly - female cutouts are the best view you'll ever be able to afford on your salary.